


Win This World At Cards

by astrea_vita



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Dominus Temporis Ex Machina, Episode: s01e06 Countrycide, Friendship, Head Cannon, Headcanon Psychic Phenomena, Headcanon Temporal Mechanics, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Psychic Violence, Temporary Character Death - Jack Harkness, Ten is the Right Kind of Doctor AU, Universe Alteration, if you will
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-09-18 10:19:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16993176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrea_vita/pseuds/astrea_vita
Summary: The Doctor never quite made the connection between the strange new Fact created on Satellite Five and the news that Jack Harkness is alive and kicking around in 21st century Cardiff, so it's just as well that he's good at ending up more or less where he needs to be.





	1. Prologue: But I Think My Timing's Wrong

**Author's Note:**

> Descriptions of violence as well as psychic assault take place in the Prologue only and are fairly canon-typical with some discussion of injuries and after-effects in later chapters.

_Time is under strain. Not all of it, mind, but there's a thread in the fabric significant enough to threaten some other threads significant enough for the whole unraveling bit to be a bad idea.  The scales of the balance thrash on rusty chains, and the links creak and groan, pulled taut toward impending finis with all the crashing of plates and lines slinging weights like cut trebuchets._

"So if we barricade ourselves in, what happens to Tosh and Ianto?" Owen asks again, and Jack bites his tongue and recalculates.

Tosh is experienced and Ianto is an unexpected force to be reckoned with in a crisis, but he knows they're all out-planned by something that knows what it's doing. He usually finds that to be the best time to introduce the element of surprise.

Jack shucks his coat, rolls up his sleeves, and checks his gun.

"I'm going to get them. Mind the kid," he says; "Lock the door behind me and hold the fort," he says; "Back in five minutes," he says.

In retrospect, not one of his brighter moves.

They don't actually kill him, at first - he wrenches himself into consciousness, head pounding, all the more disoriented for being hauled between two hooded figures up a set of stairs and across a threshold. In a second desperate bid for the element of surprise, he bucks out of their grasp, lands a few blows, and makes a break for it. Hazy, half-concussed, footfalls thudding in a dreamlike swirl of green and gray and creeping black, he barely hears the gunshots as the ground rears up and slams into him.

When he comes back, he's chained up. This allows him to assess the situation a little better.

Upon assessment, he concludes that things are looking pretty grim for the foreseeable future, unless the others manage to reconvene and pull a rescue out of their asses.

He's seen his share of weird cults, though, and he's pretty sure he's got these guys a little unnerved. They're probably not used to having their victims wake up and talk back to them.

The next time he comes back, most his ribcage is spread out on the butcher's table, and the whole place reeks even worse of fresh blood and things that he generally preferred to keep on the inside of his skin. Most of it had to regrow before he could come back, so that's something.

"Tell us what these creatures are, do they look like us?"

Tosh's voice. _Fuck._

"Well, that's one way of putting it," Jack says, resigned and irritable. "It's them, guys. No aliens. Some kinda sacrifice-plus-cannibalism ritual."

Ianto and Tosh stare. There are other circumstances in which Jack wouldn't mind, what with the bondage and his shirts in shreds on the floor; it's just that those other circumstances involve significantly less blood.

"They call it 'the Harvest,' apparently," Jack adds. "Seen this kind of thing before, it's basically about forging community identity. Staving off existential dread. You know, some people go to a rave, or take pottery classes, or start a war." He glares at the Shermans, snide and contemptuous. "We're all fucked in the head and grappling with our cosmic insignificance, you're not special because you think it's funny playing haunted house."

It's only a matter of time before they figure out that it's a bad idea to let him keep talking. Jack bargains and threatens and mocks them, outrageous and distracting as only he can do, and _it works._ When Helen turns the rifle on him, there's a flurry of movement and a dull  _thunk -_ Evan staggers back and Ianto yells at Tosh to run.

Ianto _headbutted_ the man, he realizes. Jack could kiss him, if he didn't think he'd get punched in the face again.

Jack swings out with his feet and knocks the rifle out of Helen’s hands, whoops out a laugh when he sees Tosh disappear through the door.  He lands a few heavy kicks with his heel and the blade of his foot, immeasurably pissed that they’ve taken his boots (not to mention his coat and his wrist strap), trying to keep them both confused and tripping over each other so Ianto can - he barely registers locking eyes with Ianto - _go, get out._ Ianto’s distraught, guilty face disappears, and then Jack is cross-eyed at the barrel of the rifle when it explodes in his face.

This time, he’s gagged and staring at the floor with the blood rushing to his head.  His wrists are tied together and pinned behind his back; he can’t really feel his feet, which is probably a small mercy, but he can feel some of the lesser vital organs growing back in, which is not.  On the floor a few feet away is a prone body with a filthy white shirt and a burlap bag over his head.

Jack has been chained up, creatively dispatched, or compelled to watch his people get tortured in front of him on more occasions than he'd ever like to think about. For now, all he can feel is  _annoyed,_ mind flickering bitterly to a dank candlelit alley a hundred years before, and a card that was meant to signify things like sacrifice and patience, willing surrender to his circumstances in a what was supposed to be _a goddamned metaphor._ Even vaguely psychic decks had no business in conspiring with his timeline to tell him he’d literally get strung up by the ankles and hacked at with a meat cleaver.

He can only mostly see legs when the others are shuffled in, but there's Tosh's voice and then Gwen's, and then Owen's, and there's Ianto’s dazed, crumpled face when Sherman pulls the bag off his head, and he knows it's over, but he’s been squirming away at the ropes for a while.  By now he’s managed to get one hand around to where they’ve helpfully stuck a knife in his chest, so he breathes, bites the gag, and inches it out, starting to angle it towards the rope -

He’s been going by feel, so it’s not until he sees Ianto shoved back to the floor and Sherman’s legs stomping back toward him that he knows he’s been caught out.

“You just don’t know when to fucking quit, do you?” Sherman mutters, yanking the knife away and reaching down to grab him by the hair.

Which is very true, Jack concedes. It's probably why he got that card in the first place.

He already knows he’s facing the other side of this alone.  Not having to watch them die might be all he gets.

Pressure builds in his head and light flashes across the blade of the knife - no split-second last-minute clarity in the moment before death, no epiphany, no surrender. No time to contemplate if raw terror and despair count as surrender, blood pounding in his ears as the noise builds to a crescendo, Gwen yelling and Owen cursing, cracking off the walls. The knife swipes across his neck and digs into the base of his jaw, pain white-hot and thick red torrents pouring into his face and he screams into the gag, chokes and bleeds until the blackness blooms around him and starts screaming back.

*

A light bursts and the plastic rattles, Jack's muffled death throes falling away only for the screaming to grow louder, shattering windows and blowing the lights. In the darkness and coiling wind and the tumult, Gwen manages enough comprehension for _this seems about right._ _Jack's dead so we're going to die and the world's ending and everything hurts,_ doubled-over with her eyes screwed shut and her hands over her ears and a pain like heartbreak but it's _everywhere,_ splitting out of her skull and pouring from her throat and wrenching open her ribcage and there's nothing to be done but wait for it to end.

Something touches her forehead, and then it's just dark.

There are still screams, tapering into the tormented groans of the damned, but they're bouncing off numb eardrums, more bearable for being outside her head than in it.

"Whoops," says a distant voice.

Something buzzes and a few lights flicker back on. Gwen huddles next to Tosh and Owen, who look about the same as she feels, and she scrapes together the grit to drag herself towards Ianto and fumble at the knotted cloth around his mouth.

Everything feels like the minute or so after standing up too fast - that absolute sensory clarity within complete existential disorientation. All the villagers are moaning and head-clutching. There's a man kneeling on the floor in front of Jack and two women picking their way across the room who weren't there when the lights went out. Gwen doesn't really take in their words but their voices are muted and their demeanor nonthreatening, and one of the women approaches her and takes over undoing Ianto's bindings with steadier fingers.

"What happened?" she mumbles, or just "Wha?" trying to focus on the woman, who replies with something that seems hard to argue with, because whatever she said meant that they could leave now.

They manage to get all four of them standing, even Ianto, dazed and only mostly upright by Tosh's hand around his elbow, and Gwen remembers something _really important._

 _"_ We're not leaving Jack."

She's not sure why she expected an argument, since the man has already lowered his body and undone the ropes - and, apparently, found his coat and wrapped him in it. She's fairly sure she didn't expect him to look at her with big, solemn eyes and say "'Course not," and lift Jack into his arms like he's no heavier than a slender, fainting heroine in a Gothic pastiche. She's not sure why her mind goes _there,_ but the stranger is very tall and pale and slender with a long coat of his own, and there's blood trailing out of Jack's throat so... vampire it is.

Jack would probably be sorry he missed getting bridal-carried by a tall stranger with mysterious eyes. She'll have to tell him about it later.

That's not weird. She can tell him later. It's Jack. He'll be fine.

Hunched and shivering, they all straggle after him, out of the house and into the darkness. Two beams of light bounce off the trees, and Gwen tracks one back to the red-haired woman's torch.

"There was a kid," she says. "Kieran, they took him -"

The light bounces as the woman nods vigorously. "He's alright, he got away. That one helped him hot-wire a car out of here, and he's gone to get the police."

Gwen squints at the doorway that appears when they round a large-ish tree and says numbly, "You're not police?"

"More like, private detectives," the woman says, and amends, "They're doctors," nodding at the other two. Gwen churns the concept around her curdled brain and decides that she doesn't understand any better but that it's probably okay, and the woman nods sagely and says, "I'll explain later."

The doorway goes Somewhere Else, clearly. Like Narnia, or maybe in reverse. Gwen decides that this is something to deal with later. They're led through a big round room with soft lights and a glass pillar, through a corridor with stone walls, into a room set up with sinks and cots and blankets and gadgets.

They all on some befuddled level comprehend 'hospital', accept some loose, clean, scrub-like clothes, and lie down quietly. The two women talk among themselves, darting about setting up devices, and Gwen catches their names briefly, but drops them before long. The younger of the two, with the soft, steady voice and soft, steady hands, cleans and treats the angry wound in her side. The pain numbs, and she drifts away as her voice lulls away in the background.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty sure the initial basis for this fic was 'the Doctor actually didn't abandon Jack and is very confused about his fixy-pointyness but loves him anyway', and it took on a life of its own (surprise, surprise). Probably turn into a whole verse if I'm not careful, it's fine, I only have like seven different canon divergence 'verses on the go...  
> Fic title is from A Thousand Years by Sting, chapter title is from Jerusalem by Dan Bern


	2. They Said "Time Is Relative"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titles from 'Jerusalem' by Dan Bern. This chapter borrows some canon dialogue from Utopia and then makes it do other things.

Awareness hits like a fall from a tree. Gwen’s heartbeat skyrockets and her side flares.  She sits up panting, squinting into the dark hospital bay - the lights there are soft gold and dim, like nightlights, casting strange shadows on the others, all curled fitfully under the dense blankets.

Jack’s not there. Gwen sets her face, wraps her blanket tight around her shoulders, and sets her feet on the floor.  Having braced for cold tile, she’s surprised to find it pleasantly warm as she pads softly through the door and into the corridor.

It’s not a far wander until she sees the aqua green column and the coral pillars where they came in. There’s a flicker of movement near the floor, a slosh of water, the movement of an arm - she takes a tentative step over the threshold and whispers ‘Hello?’

It comes out so soft she can barely hear it herself, but she would swear the man’s ears prick up like a puppy’s. He twists to catch her eye over his shoulder, and shoots a bemused look at the centerpiece of the room. Several lights twinkle in conspiratorial succession.  He very nearly rolls his eyes.

"You should still be in bed," he says, not unkindly.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you...”

“Nah, come on in. If, ah, you’re okay enough with -” he gestures in front of him with a drippy wet cloth.

Okay enough with the still line of Jack’s body on a stretcher. Which is levitating. And absorbent, apparently, soaking in the rivulets of blood and trailing water. The man sits cross-legged with a pan of water beside him, coat and jacket gone - no, on the railing beside Jack's coat - his light blue shirtsleeves rolled up but wet and sickly pink at the edges in his elbows.

She drifts up and sits beside him, pulling the blanket tighter.

He opens his mouth, then shuts it. His teeth click audibly.  He wrings the cloth into the pan and says, “I was about to ask ‘what’s eating you.’”

This earns a snort from her, more surprise than anything.

“Yeah, it occurred to me that it would be in bad taste.”

“Oh my god.” She wants to be indignant, mostly because the wretched giggle in her stomach is making her shrapnel wounds sing with pain.

“Sorry. Sorry.” He smiles sadly at her - she doesn’t know how his eyes do that - and tries again. “How are you holding up?”

The giggle turns into a shudder, her chest aches and her abdomen twinges.

"I don't know."

"That's a good sign," he declares, dabbing away the blood caked around Jack's nose. It's very mild for a declaration, almost nonchalant.

"Oh?"

"If you said you were fine, I'd be much more worried."

"Huh."

“Mostly because I know it's what I would say," he admits, half rueful, half conspiratorial. He sloshes the cloth into the pan and wrings it out again. "I know you must have questions.” Too many, and she doesn’t know which ones to ask.  “What do you know about me, so far? What’s Jack told you?”

"I - nothing," she admits. "I don't think I actually got your name."

"Oh, well, that'd help for a start. I'm the Doctor."

"Doctor -? Just 'the Doctor'?"

"Yup. Definite article for third person, none for the vocative."

"Come again?"

"People say 'the Doctor' when they're talking about me, just 'Doctor' when they're talking to me. Unless they're telling me off - then they get much more creative."

“Right. Jack said he was looking for the right kind of doctor, I thought he meant more in general. Are you... did you know each other?”

"Friend of his, yeah. We used to travel together, until we got separated."

Gwen stares at Jack's livid-pale face above the bloodied collar of his coat. She's not sure how long she should keep this up.

“He said something happened to him. And one day he'd find the right kind of doctor who could explain it to him. But he wasn't really... he didn't understand it very well himself, I don't think I even know the half of it.”

“Huh.” The Doctor rubs his chin. “Well, I bet I could make a guess.” He looks at her speculatively. “How much do you know about time?”

Gwen raises her eyebrows, reminded of sitting in the pub that first night, Jack talking about Rifts and catching aliens.

"I know there's more to it than clocks and calendars and stuff. Sometimes it - whatever it is - it opens up and things can come through it."

He grins. That’s something in the right direction, she feels, pinning up photos and scraps of paper to her mental bulletin board.  She tosses a ball of red yarn from hand to hand and glares mutinously. A few strings cross: between Jack and the Rift, between Jack and this Doctor, between them both and cannibals (with question marks), between the Doctor and time, time itself. She holds up the next bit of yarn and sizes out the next crossing.

“So Jack needed to know... about something having to do with time.  And you're the one to ask about it?”

After that, it’s just a waiting game, and the Doctor is as loquacious as she hoped.

“Time is... strange,” the Doctor begins. “It has its own rules, and its own laws - sometimes it’s fragile, and full of things that shouldn’t be broken, or sturdy, or bendy, full of things that can’t be broken.  There are the ways in which it usually goes about doing its business, and then there are anomalies, and phenomena. And I hail from a species that’s, was in tune with time, and maintained its integrity. Or just mucked about with it, or refused to muck about with it, depending who you ask.”

Gwen stares at him for a long few moments.

"All right?"

"Yeah. Sorry. You're an alien, then?"

"Yup." His eyes _literally_ twinkle. "Thought that was your usual gig."

"Yeah. Just. Don't usually have them saving us from other people."

He flicks his eyebrows in a way that she doesn't really know how to interpret, so she notes it and lets it pass. It is rather a lot to take in.  He also ended up talking very fast, so she might have imagined the slip she heard in the tense for the ‘to be’ verb regarding his species. Regardless of the implications, there’s a line of questioning there that seems worth exploring.

“Is Jack... the same species as you?” She doesn't think that's quite it, but it feels like she's getting warmer.

‘Questioning mode’ means lots of eye contact, supplying the body language of an engaged listener with the added bonus of an opportunity to scrutinize, so she definitely doesn’t imagine it when she sees his face freeze. More than merely stillness, his eyes go cold and void and empty, _gutted,_ which feels like an appropriate word for the night, and it’s only there for a split second and then -

The Doctor furrows and hums.  “Interesting question. He is not, but because of my relationship to time, I am able to pick up on the - ah, the temporal status of others.  You get patterns, by and large. Consistency. Jack, on the other hand, seems to be one of those phenomena, and I’m not entirely sure how that works yet.”

“Yet? And how do you mean, he’s a phenomen - er - phenomenon.”

“Most people are temporal events, we're all things in time.  We exist, we have our exits and our entrances - all I mean by phenomenon is that Jack’s a weird thing in time that I’ve never seen before.” He shrugs. “I’ve got the TARDIS running some scans, I might learn a thing or two. I have my suspicions.”

“So what does his - sorry, his - what was it? Temporal status? What is it you’re getting from it?”

“Just a feeling, really.”  His speculative look turns shrewd, and he presses a button and the hover-stretcher lowers itself to the metal grating. “Do you know the movie ‘The Princess Bride?’”

“Yeah?” Gwen smiles, a little bemused. “My boyfriend loves it.”

“Welll... like it says.  There’s a big difference between _mostly_ dead and all dead. And _mostly_ dead is slightly -”

Jack wakes like a deep-sea diver hitting the surface, screaming in lungfuls of air.

The Doctor yelps as bits of the console spark and fry, and he scrambles to his feet and bats at them.

" _Nononono,_ hey, don’t be like that, shhhh - "

One of Jack’s hands catches on her knee - a mooring line hitting the dock. His other hand claps around his own mouth, his eyes squeeze shut as what’s left of the angry red gash fades beneath from his throat. The coat parts around his bare chest when he sits up - thin pink skin weaves and knits over new muscle tissue on his abdomen, and he makes a ragged whimper at the back of his newly-healed larynx.

“Easy, Jack!”

He stares at her in surprise for a moment, but gingerly shifts himself up and reaches for her hand. She squeezes gently, gets her voice under control and lowers the pitch to something more soothing - “you’re alright, you’ll be alright, just breathe...” she’s really only seen him come back the once, and he didn’t seem to be in nearly this much pain, she doesn’t really know what the healing is like for him but it must be worse this time, and the coming back from the dead bit is still a bit weird, thanks very much.

But it’s okay, he’s whole, he’s breathing - he opens his mouth and fervently mouths the word _fuck_ , or she assumes that he says it out loud, but the room makes a cranky noise over it.

He snaps into focus.

“Really?” the Doctor says, staring at the console.

Gwen clears her throat, and he looks back. His face lights up, and he edges back towards them and kneels on the floor beside her, looking at Jack with a fragile kind of hope.

“Hi. Welcome back.”

 _God,_ the look on Jack’s face - it makes the back of her throat seize up and ache down the center of her chest. Even at his most sincere, his moments of frustration, rage, and grief were never like this - this kind of unmasked desperation and longing, this terror like it might be snatched away and shattered, all raw and naked as his new-grown skin.

“Doctor?”

She can't leave, because Jack still has her hand in a death-grip (an unfortunate term, considering; she's starting to understand where the Doctor got his puns), completely still except his pulse is so fast it might as well be vibrating, as he and the Doctor stare at each other in absolute bewilderment.

The Doctor's face clears first. “Face! Sorry, new face, regeneration, it’s a Time Lord thing.  Still me in here, I promise.”

Jack gets his own expression on lockdown and waves his other hand dismissively. “Yeah, no, I heard, I've been - ” Jack cuts off whatever he was about to say when he looks at Gwen, like he's only just realized she was there. "You're okay." She nods earnestly. "All of you?" He looks away first, like he doesn't want to hear, but catches the Doctor nodding too - like a bobble-head in an earthquake, Gwen thinks. “You saved my team?”

“Yeah, they’re okay, they’re all on board.”

“Okay. Right. Okay.” Jack squeezes her hand hard again as another conflicted and intensely bewildered look crosses his face. "Where the _hell_ have you been?"

"Uh," the Doctor begins eloquently, and then squawks, "You can talk!" and Gwen half expects his hair to rise like the crest of an indignant cockatiel.

"Right here! By the Rift! Waiting for you!" Jack's voice cracks, and the Doctor's pitch starts there and only gets higher.

"I thought you were dead!"

"I can't die!" Jack says, eyes wide and darting wildly.

"Yes, well, I'm getting that _now_!"

Jack's face wavers and sets, his eyes glittering. He lets go of her hand and _launches_ himself at the Doctor.

It takes her a solid second or three to realize that Jack isn't trying to attack him, around the point where _oh god Jack is shaking_ and the Doctor's got an arm around his shoulders, grimacing as his other hand lands in Jack’s sticky hair.

Gwen sits frozen, starting to draw a hazy comprehension around _'have you ever loved someone that much'_ and _'don't you ever get scared, Jack?'_

The Doctor looks at her over Jack’s shoulder, sad-eyed but reassuring, then glances towards the hallway. She nods, and slips away.

*

Jack makes an interrogative noise and the Doctor lets go, lets him sit back. "Villagers?"

"Sorted. Got your kit clear before we got the police-police into the picture. Had a fabulous cover story about being your back-up."

Jack frowns, makes a few intuitive leaps that involve the SUV and pretty much every piece of equipment they have being emblazoned with the Torchwood logo, and closes his eyes in defeat. When he opens them, the Doctor is eyeing him curiously.

"I can explain."

"Uh?"

Jack frowns at him like he's being dense on purpose, considers that he might be. Suddenly chilled, he reconsiders. "Has the... have you been to Canary Wharf?"

The Doctor's face immobilizes. "Yes."

Jack's heart sinks. He was so worried about the timelines conflicting that he didn't even notice it rise with the hope of seeing Rose again.

"About Torchwood. I can explain."

"Okay."

He can't read the Doctor's face at all, but there's no actual hostility, so he'll work with what he's got.

"Gotta ask. I saw the list of the dead. I-it said 'Rose Tyler.'"

“No, nonono! She’s alive!”

“What? You're kidding!”

“She’s alive, she’s safe! She's, um.” His smile dims as quickly as it was lit. “That, that was the good news. Bad news is, she’s trapped on the other side. Parallel universe.  She almost... but she’s fine. She’s there, and she’s got Mickey, and her Mum, and her parallel-universe Dad.”

“But she can’t come back across?”

“Nope.”

Jack manages a nod.

“She’s alive. That’s... more than I could have hoped for.”  

The Doctor cocks his head to the side where the console room gives way to the corridor through which Gwen departed. “Probably the theme of the night, speaking of which - do they all know? About your, ah, resurrection capabilities?”

“Just her. Maybe. Before tonight, anyway. They got me four or five times, the others must have seen something. Even if they didn't, I don't think I'm getting out of telling them now.” Jack tilts his own head. “How long have you known?”

“For certain? 'Bout two minutes. Suspected something or other, based on your time signature, but couldn't be sure. I certainly hoped, because if not, I would have gotten here only to find I’d lost you again, and... well.”

“Nobody’s been able to make it stick since that day on Satellite Five. I thought, out of anybody, you’d know why.”

“Nobody’s been able to - who’s been trying?” the Doctor yelped, then looked very stern. "Don't tell me you've been trying."

"Haven't had to. Start with the villagers and work your way back. So you didn’t even know I was alive, and that I couldn’t die, and you just happened to -” Jack waves a hand in the air.

The Doctor hems and tips his head from side to side.

“Your - whatever it is, whatever you are, it has something to do with the time vortex. I’m not sure how it happened but I’m getting a pretty good fix on what, and your temporal signature is not only at odds with whatever the rift feels like doing, it’s very easy to confuse with that of the entire 20th and 21st centuries, which, I suppose you never could do anything by halves, and do you want to have this conversation when you’re not soaked in your own blood?” Jack blinks. “Because frankly I’d be much happier to have it when I’m not soaked in your blood, but I have managed to have worse conversations under worse circumstances, so we can do this now or we can -”

“Shower. Shower would be nice.” Jack can feel the grin bubbling around in his chest, a little hysterical, before it ends up spreading across his face.  “Of course, if you need one too, you could always join me -”

“Oh, there you are, I was getting worried. Run along, I’ll grab you some clothes.”

“What do I need those for?”

“Ship full of 21st century humans.” The Doctor ruffles his hair, wincing sympathetically as his fingers catch, and stands, offering a hand to pull him to his feet.

“Always spoiling my fun. Hey.” He plasters on a ghost of his usual smile and clings to his hand. "It's good to see you again."

The Doctor beams at him. "Good to have you back."

 


	3. Or Did You Misread Einstein

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> would you like a little technobabble with your h/c

Jack doesn’t know how long he’s been in the shower, but he registers with a dull sort of surprise that the Doctor has wandered in and set a stack of clothes and towels on the counter.

Also, he's not sure when he wound up sitting on the floor.

He manages to plaster up a grin and an eyebrow when the Doctor casually, almost absentmindedly shucks his clothes, shoving them into a forlorn pile near the drain. He grabs a bottle of soap, waits until Jack's wandering gaze makes it back towards his face before he rolls his eyes and drops beside him.

“Don’t go getting your hopes up, or anything else." The Doctor drops a cold lump of soap on the crown of Jack's head, sticks his hands in his hair and starts attacking the bits caked with blood. "I ended up with a fondness for a lot of human bonding pastimes this go 'round, but sex isn’t one of them.” Jack gives him a sidelong curious look. “No, shut your eyes.”

Jack hums, makes some barely discernible noises about grooming, and still confusing them for monkeys, and the Doctor flicks some drops at his nose.

"How bad is it for you?" he asks, voice pitched low but mild. "Dying and coming back?"

Jack makes a muffled noise. "Some worse than others. Sometimes it's like waking up with pins and needles. Sometimes it's like a, a sandpaper whirlpool. Coarse sandpaper. Bits of glass. On fire."

The Doctor makes a sympathetic noise between his teeth. "Sounds about right."

Jack opens his eyes. "Yeah?"

"Regeneration. Happens when I'm dying, or mortally wounded, or what have you. Fiery sandpaper vortex from start to finish. I just sort of... get close, though. Don't actually go there and back again."

"Don't really remember it, being over there," Jack mumbles preemptively.

"Probably just as well. I have a suspicion the only time death is comprehensible is if someone's doing something wrong."

"Dunno. Pretty sure I'm still doing something wrong."

"Unless I miss my guess, this was nothing of your doing."

They’re silent for a while, Jack’s head tilted under the water to let the soap stream away. He opens his eyes again and says, “Hey, one of my team was Torchwood London. Just a head's up.”

“You mean your young man who took one look at me and started swearing?”

Jack considers this. "Could have just been Owen. Was it Owen?"

"Didn't get everyone's name. They were a little... out of it."

"How are they?"

“Sleeping it off. Be alright by morning, give or take a few hours. Best be thinking about what you want to tell them.”

“Gonna depend on what you wanna tell me.”

“Okay. Jim-jams first.”

*

"So'd the TARDIS scans tell you anything?"

Jack's room is as he left it. It's like how he feels when he sees museum exhibits of World War barracks or Edwardian boardinghouses, but _so much weirder._

"Only what I suspected. Your temporal status is, shall we say, unprecedented."

The Doctor never, to his recollection, visited him in it. He's not sure what to do with the image of his new incarnation, on his bed all cross-legged and gangly in _pastel pinstriped pajamas,_ good lord, and a blue dressing gown with a pack of biscuits sticking out of the pocket. More than just his face has changed if 'I don't do domestic' has been thusly succeeded by 'stay up late, wash each other's hair and talk about science.'

"Okay."

Tired but restless, Jack wanders around the room, poking at things that tug at memories both vague and vivid, clung to and pushed away in equal desperation. He's only got a century’s worth of uncertainty and resentment to shed, and it aches, how much he’s missed what he only had for a few months and even after all this time he hasn’t forgotten.

"And there's a lot of it. Unprecedented amounts of temporal status."

"Okay."

"So the Time War messed everything up. All the safeguards and regulations and limitations on the nature of time, everything holding it in check, making sure the things you shouldn't do were things you couldn't do - that all went out the window. Uhh, did they, did they cover planar development theory in the Time Agency?"

"Eh -" Jack holds his palm down flat and waggles it like a tippy scale. "I'm a little rusty."

"Okay, have you seen _Back to the Future_ recently?"

"I mean, if you're counting when it came out." Jack harbors a certain soft spot for humanity's early baby steps towards temporal theory. "Aw, hell, is it that thing where you alter a timeline but still remember the original conditions?"

"Yes. Exactly. Sort of. Except you _don't_ remember the original conditions. The impact isn't noticeable, 'cause it occurs on a meta-planar alteration of existence. I mean, I'd notice it, but mostly because I'm equipped for that. Also, it's not just a bit of mucking with a piece of history, it's everything _. Everything_ changes _._ Macro-scale. This particular case, the laws of time are still in effect, but they're easier to break because they aren't enforced. Used to be they'd always been enforced. Now they've never been enforced."

"Ouch."

More tired now than restless, Jack shuffles back to the bed, flops down and sprawls out wide.  He hasn't been able to do on his cot in the bunker for years, and it rarely goes over well when he indulges the impulse on other peoples' beds. Apparently, it ranks up there with snoring, and hogging the covers.

"Yeah." The Doctor crunches thoughtfully on a biscuit. "And once it happens for your entire conditions, it gets easier to do for your important bits of history. Say for example your laws of time are pretty deterministic. So there's no way for you to alter history, because no matter how much you meddle, your meddling is always part of history. But if something catastrophic happens on a meta-planar level, now your meddling starts throwing timelines out of whack on an intra-planar level. The results are sort of like -" he waves his hand and pinches his thumb and fingers together like a crab claw, snatching at the air for a feral example. "Like. Climate change, that's been going on for your lot lately! You got your whole universe that operates according to mild seasonal shifts and temperatures and weather events that pretty well stayed within certain parameters. Time War comes along, _a la_ humanity and irresponsible industry practices, and the whole thing goes pear-shaped and now you're dealing with your whole universe with all manner of spikes and drops and broken records, floods in some places and droughts in others -"

Jack shifts up onto an elbow and just _looks_ at him.

"- right."

"What happened to me."

The Doctor holds out one of the biscuits. He shakes his head, so the Doctor shoves it in his mouth, sets the packet aside and scoots back to lean against the headboard. He waves his hands around, rubs his chin, and mimes out an explanation to the other side of the room before meeting Jack's eyes again.

"Wasn't sure," he says when he finishes chewing, "Until you said what you did about Satellite Five. It was Rose. Had to be. Only thing I know of that could have pulled it off, for a start."

Jack rifles through the events of that day, buried and un-buried like a much-gnawed bone. "What actually happened that day? Thought you sent her home, but the TARDIS -"

"She came back. Both of them, I mean. Rose... opened the heart of the TARDIS and absorbed the Time Vortex."

"Uh." Jack screws his face up. "Rose did _what_ now?"

"Okay, remember Margaret? Slitheen, Mayor of Cardiff?"

"Vividly." Boy, wasn't that a nightmare the second time through, when it _broke the entire Hub._

"Yeah. So you remember what that looked like, the day Margaret looked into the heart of the TARDIS. So Rose got the TARDIS open, except, instead of the TARDIS reversing her lifespan, I guess you could say she became an avatar or a vessel or something. Basically, she and the TARDIS and the time vortex all teamed up."

"Shit."

"Precisely. No one's ever meant to have that sort of power. If a Time Lord tried that... come to think of it, somebody might well have. Wouldn't be pretty, and it's the sort of no-no that'd get your timeline wiped from existence, if they could catch you. But Rose was human, and I think that's part of why it worked."

"Why what worked?" It comes out with a harder edge than Jack intends. He glances away and wraps one hand around his other wrist.

"Why she was able to channel the vortex energy. To travel back to Satellite Five, to turn the Daleks into dust. To bring you back to life."

Jack stares at the bed covers, and finds no further meaning there.

"That's quite something, really," the Doctor muses.  "Final act of the Time War was life."

"I don't understand." Jack lifts his head, not sure what he's going to see.

The Doctor looks sheepish. "That's where I get a bit fuzzy on it myself, I'm afraid. The TARDIS operates with time in some ways that are beyond even my comprehension. I can see it, sometimes, but she's part of it, and it's part of her. She knew there were limits to what Rose could do, and what she would do. Even so, she couldn't control Rose, and Rose couldn't control the time vortex, not really. She brought you back to life, and from the looks of things, well."

"Well."

"It went a bit too far. It tied you to existence so thoroughly that you became a fixed point in space and time, so permanently it even overruled death. You're a fact, Jack."

"Wow." Jack cringes. "You're terrible. Never say that again."

"Sorry." The Doctor ruffles his hair. For all that Jack misses the face and voice of the Doctor he knew with an ache a century and more in the making, he could get used to the idea of spontaneous gestures of affection without having to fall all over himself to earn them. "What do you remember? What happened to you after Satellite Five?"

"Woke up in the hallway, ankle-deep in dust, just in time to hear the TARDIS disappearing. So I thought, 'maybe they just thought I was dead, I better catch up to them.' Figured on 21st century Britain, being Rose's home time, but I overshot on my last bounce, and the power it took burnt out my wrist strap-" Jack sits up, realizing how long he's been holding his own bare wrist. "Oh, _fuck,_ tell me you found it."

"I found it, I found it, what do you take me for?" The Doctor looks at the ceiling. "Huh. No swear filter in here."

"Nah, it'd kill the mood." Jack takes a deep breath and settles back in, waiting for his heart rate to calm down.

"Can't have that, can we. How far did you overshoot?"

"Got stuck in 1869. Spent years chasing mysteries and rumors and hobnobbing with your kind of people, looking for a version of you that would coincide with me. Couple of decades, I'm not looking much older, I chalk it up to good genes. 1892, I got in a fight; shot through the heart. Woke up in the morgue, scared the bejeezus out of the undertaker."

The Doctor grins nostalgically.

"And it never stopped. Torchwood Cardiff got their claws into me a few years later, I was trying to keep an eye on the rift in case you came back to refuel. Started to get more scared of coming back every time than I was scared of dying for good. Fell off a cliff, got trampled by horses, World War I, World War II, poison, starvation, a stray javelin…"

The Doctor closes his eyes and runs a hand through his hair - his own, this time. It goes _everywhere._ "I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry." He sits up and looks back at him, but he sounds tired.

"But you said it was vortex energy from the TARDIS," Jack says, almost stumbling on the words. "Does that mean she could fix me? Change me back?"

The Doctor opens his mouth, makes a drawn-out noise that eventually goes up in pitch.

Jack gives him an unimpressed look. "She didn't translate that."

"Sorry." The Doctor grimaces. "The short answer is, I _really_ don't know, but I don't think we can."

Jack exhales heavily and wraps his arms around his knees. "The long answer?"

"Also a bit meta-planar." The Doctor runs his tongue around his mouth and waves his hands in front of him again. "I had to take the time vortex out of Rose before it could kill her. Didn't have anywhere for it to go, so the energy went into me, and most of it got converted in my regeneration. I also can't be the one to open the TARDIS and take the energy to use, because she knows better and wouldn't let me."

"But you're -"

The Doctor looks at him sadly and shakes his head. "Even if I could trust myself to, to not completely go off my own head, and do _only_ what we set out to do, there are still the implications of erasing a fixed point in space and time. Which is bad enough with the usual kind, and those are barely even _things,_ they're, they're like a bit of silence between notes, a firing synapse. 'Between the idea and the reality, the motion and the act, falls the shadow.'"

"Oh, I met him."

"Yeah?"

"Guy was _really_ high-strung in person."

"Mm, I think Virginia said the same. Are you following me on this?"

"Fixed points aren't things. I'm -" Jack waves a hand in the air. " - things. Also a fixed point."

"Last time I mucked with a fixed point, we had Reaper trouble." Jack winces. "Now ask me about the implications of breaking off a fixed point that has had shape and substance for over a century, and that's just in terms of what's on the record for me, that's my, my plausible deniability as an observer of your timeline, bloody hell. I hadn't really thought this out properly, the sheer amount of energy that would take, we couldn't do it without ripping the universe inside out. Especially if we did it in _Cardiff_."

Jack's hands clench and his jaw tightens.

"There's a reason I still try to keep to some of the old rules," the Doctor goes on, a little more softly. "The consequences of breaking them are profound, and usually devastating, and completely lost on an omnipotent teenager who wants her friend back. And I don't get to put things back to the way they were before the Time War, I just try to patch up the bits I can, tie some unravelling threads together and pray it holds. And now we're woven into this new plane where you're part of what's holding the universe together."

"So I just keep going on like this. And you have no idea if it ever actually ends."

"I don't think you're eternal," the Doctor muses. "Which I'm mostly saying because there's weird stuff I don't understand, and then there's _the incomprehensible_. The problem is, I don't know how much excess Time Vortex you're tapping into, because I don't have what it takes to see fixed points in that way. This is _new,_ and completely antithetical to everything I've ever known about them, so barring some major cognitive paradigm shifts, I can't see how much there is and whether it's contained." Jack gives him a miserable look. "I can work on it, just might take me a while. Tell you this, though. I felt what was happening when you died, and when you came back. Best I can describe it is that your existence is like a constant energy exchange with the time vortex, and my hunch is that at some point, it's going to even out. All that extra borrowed time, paid back to its source."

"How long are we talking?" Jack's voice is flat, strained taut and stretched thin. "I'm in my hundred-and-seventies. Are we talking thousands of years? More? Am I gonna outlive you?" It cracks at the end and he starts to shake.

"Right. First off." The Doctor presses their foreheads together and holds him by the back of his neck. "You could live millions of years _and_ live to see the day I die, and I could still wander across your path the very next week, because I could never do anything in the right order and I'm very bad for closure in that way, but there we are. Second off, breathe for a second. Deep breath in, good, five, six, seven, third, now, having your life stretch out in front of you like that when you've got no other choice than to stay in it is enough to drive anyone mad - breathe out. But it already does that to plenty of people, even when they've got finite lifespans and a choice in the matter, so right now we're just going to do what they do. Breathe in - you're going to take a nap and when you wake up we're gonna have eggs and toast and see how your friends are doing, and the inevitability of existence is only going to consume _some_ of your waking moments - and, out - and in the rest of them you're just going to get on with things, and we're all going to find a way to deal with existing, breathe in, but if you want to have a good cry for a bit before you do that, I'd say you're more than owed, breathe out."

Jack breathes out.

It starts as a good cry, which is fine - just because he's under a lot of pressure to keep his act together doesn't mean he's gone  _that_ native and bought into all that 'stiff upper lip' nonsense. Unfortunately, he doesn't get many opportunities to get it out of his system, what with being surrounded by people who are too culturally repressed to deal with their own feelings, let alone his. He's gotten in the habit of saving it for when he's on his own time, and that can only do so much.

It's another one in the plus column for this new version of the Doctor, because the last one was always a bit uppity when he and Rose got emotional about things.

By the time he realizes what he's been carrying for over a century without being able to let his guard down, Jack is curled against his side, just about lucid enough to realize how much he's still shaking. His existential crisis-turned-panic attack creeps on interminably, like a fever dream. He might have slept, or drifted into an instantaneous blankness that startled him into alert disorientation, with about three horrifying seconds he thinks he's alone. The relief that follows when something breathing and bony stirs next to him might have almost been blissful, if it hadn't felt so much like dying and coming back, and started another round of shaking.

Eventually, he's pretty sure he can hear the TARDIS singing, and then he sleeps.

"She never would have wanted this for you," the Doctor murmurs at some point when Jack drifts back to the edge of consciousness.

Jack adds two more things to the plus column, because the Doctor apparently still likes holding hands, or is at least alright with the fact that Jack isn't letting him have his back any time soon; also, he still has really great hands. (He'll probably want the one in the jar back too - all in good time.)

"She didn't remember becoming Bad Wolf. When I changed, she was scared, and she asked if we could go back and get you and I said, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry - I heard you. Last man standing, and then... but every now and again she'd turn around like she expected you to still be there. She was never - sad, exactly, never actually grieved. For a while I thought it just hadn't sunk in, that it was normal and had to take its own time. Visited the memorial for the Time War at the Eye of Orion, I thought it might help. And then there was the battle, and after the battle, and Rose was gone and I was, I barely even know what I was doing. Running around like an angry headless chicken, squabbling with a bunch of muckety-muck generals, and someone dropped your name. Managed to shut me up for a whole thirty seconds."

Jack chuffs softly.

"I had a chance to say goodbye to her," the Doctor goes on. "Got a glimpse through to her world before the walls closed off for good. I told her you were still alive and she was - she knew, she said, she wasn't sure how but she felt like she'd known all along. Couldn't really say why, it was just a feeling. And I never quite put the pieces together - _I bring life_ , she said, and I felt it, I knew something happened but I was _so_ _thick_ and I didn't know what it meant."

Jack sighs heavily into the pillow and slits his eyes open. "How long for you? You been alone since then?"

"Not very, no. Moment we lost contact, Donna showed up in the console room, in her wedding dress, shouting her head off, and that was a whole thing. Uh, that hasn't happened yet, that's this Christmas. Don't worry about the big spider-web hovering over London, we've got it covered. Then we had to rehabilitate a whole nest of baby Racnoss, and then the TARDIS was having problems because of the huon particles and I couldn't get anywhere near Cardiff, and then we met Martha, you'll like her, and then we met William Shakespeare, you'd like him, and then we got stuck in traffic, and then there were _more Daleks_."

Adrenaline crackles through him at the word, down his arms and out his fingertips. It skitters away as quickly, but Jack isn't getting back to sleep now.

"And, um, I put things off for a bit," the Doctor added. "Dealing with them, dealing with leftover cybermen, didn't know how to go find you and tell you I lost Rose, didn't know how to tell Martha about her cousin. Then we almost fell into a sun. Anyway. It's been a couple of months, what with getting my head screwed back on."

"How's that going for you?"

"Good, actually," he says brightly. "Well, not bad. Wellll, it's a work in progress, but it's happening. D'you want breakfast?"

" _God_ , yes," Jack admits, humoring him. "I got disemboweled, I always come back starving when that happens."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't aiming for a complete re-hash of Utopia, but I did want to find a way to marry canon information with the fic premise that a substantial fixed point is a whole new thing (and that the Doctor meets it in a way that is more consistent with the message of the show than the 'prejudiced against fixed points' Time Lord bs). Hope you guys enjoy, lemme know what you think.


End file.
